VMWare Fusion 11 EOL'd?

[stephenspencer]

What is the status of VMWare Fusion 11 (for Intel Macs)?

Our institution has an agreement with VMWare and OnTheHub for distribution of various VMWare products, and a newly-acquired license for VMWare Fusion 11 comes with an expiration date of the end of the year, not a twelve-month license as is normal.

I've seen an EOL of the end of the year (2021) for VMWare Fusion 12, and no mention of VMWare Fusion 11 - is it already EOL'd and we're just running out the clock?

Thanks.

[ColoradoMarmot]

You'd have to check with customer support for the specific legal agreements, but in general Fusion 11 is no longer sold for new licenses once Fusion 12 was released.  There are downgrade rights for Fusion 12 licenses back to Fusion 11, so maybe that's what you're seeing?

[wila]

Hi,

Yes, sadly VMware Fusion 11 has been EOL for a while now.
There's some reasons to keep using it though, like that it has much better support for using nested virtualization.

There used to be a pdf I could point to for these type of questions, but VMware has made it into an app (sigh).. so the info is here https://lifecycle.vmware.com/#/
Make sure to also select "unsupported", sort on name, switch to show 100 lines instead of 20 and then you can find it.

Here's a screenshot.

If you need a license for VMware Fusion 11, then you can actually get a VMware Fusion 12 license and use that with Fusion 11. See also here: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Fusion-Discussions/quot-Could-not-open-dev-vmmon-No-such-fi...

Note that normally a license does not expire. Licenses that come with an expiration date are a different kind of license than what you can buy in VMware's online shop.

--
Wil

[stephenspencer]

I work at a university and the licenses we get are twelve months in duration. Definitely different from a commercial license, though I do appreciate your letting me know about this.

I guess the larger issue is the eventual sunsetting of Intel-based Macs and VMWare Fusion versions that work on them. The comments on the last VMWare blog "update" on the status of Fusion in the M1 era lead me to believe there are plenty of people who depend on this software, and they're upset about not having a solution.

[Technogeezer]

While plenty of people that depend on Intel architecture virtualization solutions on Intel Macs are justifiably upset,  the bigger issue is that neither future versions of Fusion nor Parallels Workstation will run existing x86 Windows, Linux and Mac virtual machines on Apple Silicon (M1). A transition to operating systems that run on the ARM architecture is pretty much a given at this point..

Most of those having these issues are running Windows VMs on Macs. There is currently no version of Windows that can be licensed from Microsoft that can legally run on M1 based Macs.(regardless of what other vendors will sort of tell you with a wink wink nudge nudge). 

[ColoradoMarmot]

There is no solution, and will be no solution, to run intel guests on an M1 chip.  Simply no technically realistic.

If microsoft changes their windows 11 EULA to allow it to run on a non-OEM machine, then we will likely see Windows 11 ARM on Fusion, which then in turn can emulate some intel applications (like Rosetta does on the host).  Until that happens though, we're out of luck.